Microsoft Teams Rooms is a conference room tech solution for today’s AI-powered workplace. It features modernized Microsoft Teams technologies optimized for hybrid work environments, and it has had a positive impact on productivity since being installed in thousands of conference rooms across Microsoft’s campuses.

When Teams Rooms was initially deployed in 2019, the focus was on modernizing meeting rooms with Teams-integrated features to meet today’s virtual and hybrid workplace needs.

Building on the success of that endeavor, the next iteration of Teams Rooms is Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms, which allows you to deploy the Teams Rooms experience at scale in smaller meeting rooms at a lower price point and lower maintenance costs.

Internally here at Microsoft, our work to get Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms off the ground was done in partnership with The Hive, which is a workshop on our headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington, where our engineers, architects, and designers work together to create new products and experiences that we roll into the Teams Rooms suite of products. Through research at The Hive, our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, partnered with the Teams Rooms product group to create Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Faster deployment combined with a simpler tech solution for our smaller meeting rooms makes Teams Rooms Express 40% to 50% less expensive than a standard Teams Room deployment,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for Microsoft Digital who works in The Hive. “We want to look for ways to reduce costs and make our deployment process more efficient. And if we can get the cost of operating our small rooms down, then we can upgrade more of our small rooms.”

Currently the more robust version of the Teams Rooms technology solution is deployed in hundreds of conference rooms on our campuses around the globe, and our ultimate goal is to transform all our conference rooms—many of them smaller, focus rooms—using the new more affordable Teams Rooms Express solution.

When it came to creating Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms, our focus was on three main pillars: User experience, security, and cost.

• User experience: All conference rooms must meet a minimum bar for user experience that delivers an AI-powered workplace experience. The goal is to make it easy and intuitive for all of our employees to use all of our conference rooms.
• Security standards: Each conference room must meet minimum security standards to ensure the safety and integrity of the technology and data used within a room.
• Cost efficiency: By reducing the cost of deploying and upgrading rooms, the number of rooms that can be upgraded within an available budget can be maximized. This involves making the deployment process more efficient and finding ways to reduce the overall cost of room upgrades by decreasing the deployment friction and infrastructure complexity.

“The more we can put modern technology such as AI in our rooms, the better the user experience,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Additionally, modern technology in the rooms makes it a more secure environment, and if we can do that more cost effectively, then we can increase the number of rooms we can deploy.”

Creating a room-in-a-box solution

After the success of transforming larger rooms into Teams Rooms through a pilot program of 70 rooms across Microsoft campuses in Singapore, Taiwan, Munich, Vancouver, and Redmond, the goal became to create a “room-in-a-box” solution for smaller rooms. For these solutions all the components were pre-engineered and ready for quick deployment, says Sarika Kesavan, a senior program manager on the Teams Rooms product group.

“There was an opportunity with smaller rooms to create something that could be set up and ready to go in hours instead of days like it takes for the more traditional rooms,” Kesavan says.

Working with smaller rooms and having simpler technology solutions meant there wasn’t a need for a general contractor, licenses, or permits. This made setup easier and removed some of the frustrations customers expressed with the deployment process for larger rooms.

Some of the main tradeoffs of working in smaller rooms included smaller screen sizes for the Express Install rooms and a single camera instead of multiple cameras like in the larger conference rooms. For the smaller conference rooms the equipment can sit on a table, whereas a furniture base can house all the components in the smaller multi-purpose rooms.

“In the smaller rooms it’s a stand, a base with the computer sitting behind it and becomes this nice kind of all-in-one concept where the technology sits on the furniture,” says David Brown, a senior field IT manager in Microsoft Digital. “So, when you think about fixings and mountings, it is easier to deploy because you don’t have to think about things like how you’re fixing it to the wall.”

Finding the right fit for the technology

The Hive team worked with various commercial partners that specialize in mounting and furniture solutions to create stands that would be the perfect fit. One of the manufacturers was Salamander Designs.

“At the time, there wasn’t a purpose-built tabletop for video conferencing. So, we started to ideate with them jointly and through multiple conversations we landed on something that worked,” says Scott Srolis, president of Salamander Designs. “They definitely had a vision of what they wanted and knew what would work for them. We worked together to bring that vision to life.”

Salamander is one of several furniture manufacturers that will create custom stands and housing for Teams Rooms Express Installation. And several other Microsoft technology partners will be creating bundles of Teams-certified equipment to provide customers with options to choose from when it comes to setting up Express Install rooms.

Multiple Teams-certified tech bundles and various display options aren’t the only future plans for Teams Rooms Express Install. Brown says he would like to see all rooms at Microsoft upgraded to Teams rooms.

“We are always looking to improve and iterate,” Brown says. “As we continue to move away from bring-your-own-device situations, we want to have every room be a Teams Room.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms at your company:

• Faster deployments with pre-bundled tech: Many of Microsoft’s partners are creating bundles made specifically for Express Install.
• Teams Rooms for everyone: The interactive, hybrid-meeting-friendly features of Teams Rooms can be deployed at scale with Express Install.
• State-of-the-art conference rooms at half the cost: Faster deployment combined with a simpler tech solution makes Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms 40-50% less expensive than a standard Teams Rooms deployment.

Find out more about Express Install for Microsoft Teams.

• Watch a video about Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Find out how telecom expenses for Florida Crystals dropped by three-quarters thanks to Teams Rooms.
• Read the Microsoft Teams blog.
• Get the latest Microsoft Teams product updates.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post A ‘room in a box:’ Upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

And for good reason—The Hive is where we in Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT organization, create cutting-edge meeting experiences that get rolled into Microsoft Teams Rooms, our video conferencing product in Microsoft Teams.

Until recently, The Hive has been an internal-facing resource where we, with our partners in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group, experimented with ways to improve meeting experiences at Microsoft.

“What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

However, as the work-from-home movement took off and customer interest in what we were doing in The Hive exploded, we made the decision to invite customers into our lab.

“Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager on our Microsoft Digital team at the Hive. “What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

To this end, our team has built a new customer experience at The Hive that features live demonstrations that show customers how to visualize how Microsoft Teams Rooms function in different settings.

Magic laboratory tours

Tours at The Hive are kind of like a meeting technology “speed dating” experience. Rather than just presenting a slide deck, we take a hands-on approach, spinning up a meeting (complete with realistic bot attendees) across a variety of spaces so customers can experience different room sizes, technologies, and scenarios in one walk through the facility. We can even invite their remote colleagues in for an additional point of view.

“We bring customers into The Hive, tour them through, and demonstrate how Microsoft creates cutting-edge meeting experiences in hybrid work environments,” Marzynski says. “And then we share our processes and know-how to help them create their own inclusive hybrid work meeting experiences at their companies.”

The tours are so popular that interest far exceeds our team’s capacity. We’ve also built virtual room tours, where you can go online to see how actual Teams Rooms look and feel around our campuses. “It’s kind of like teleporting around a house you’re interested in on a real estate site,” Marzynski says.

Microsoft Teams Rooms are represented as about a dozen different archetypes ranging from a Focus room for four people to an executive boardroom for over 30 people. These function as design references to inspire and unblock customers.

“Internally, we go super-deep with room specifications down to the last cable and screw required in the room,” Marzynski says. “While we do share those, it can be confusing when facing down a hybrid-work transformation challenge. Archetype thinking helps customers get out the weeds and imagine how to scale out a common room experience across a whole real estate portfolio.”

Ultimately, our team is focused on using The Hive to empower our customers to build their own experiences using Teams Rooms and other Microsoft technologies.

Building innovative hybrid meeting experiences

Interacting with external customers at The Hive has allowed us to more deeply understand our customers and their pain points. Understandably, we learned that customers want to create a welcoming, inclusive hybrid work environment while controlling costs.

Microsoft Teams Rooms archetypes

We’re not just working with expensive, experimental, showy new technologies at The Hive. We have three points of view through which we evaluate our work there: Capability, collaboration, and cost.

Capability refers to what people can accomplish in a meeting space with the right technology. Collaboration alludes to how we take advantage of moments that matter to make collective effort in meetings as seamless and productive as possible, and cost translates as ensuring that we’re driving value and recommending the most durable investments in hybrid work experiences.

With these central ideas in mind, The Hive created an entirely reimagined meeting room that we’re now using across the company—the Signature Teams Room.

Signature is the most evolved embodiment of Microsoft Teams Rooms. It’s designed to provide a fully inclusive and collaborative meeting experience for all attendees, whether they’re joining remotely or in-person. It includes specialized furniture, displays, cameras, and audio devices that are arranged in a way that makes it easier for all attendees to engage with each other.

 “It’s where the engineering of the technology and the design of the furniture and physical environment are fully integrated to create the most hybrid-friendly, inclusive experience possible,” Marzynski says.

One of the key features of a Signature Teams Room is a relocated central focal point for meeting attendees.

In a traditionally laid-out meeting room, the focal point of the meeting tends to be the center of a table, as it has been since meetings were invented. Remote participants tend to be off to the side of the room on a monitor, away from this focal point.

“Remote attendees can feel like observers, rather than participants, in a poorly thought-out traditional design,” Marzynski says. “You’re looking through what feels like a security camera, at a room of people that are sitting around a table, often facing away from you. And the in-room experience suffers as well, since everyone is forced to pay a cognitive tax to simultaneously balance two different types of interactions in two different parts of the room.”

By altering the room’s layout and selecting complementing hardware, Signature Teams Rooms have what is called a “circle of inclusion,” which welcomes in remote attendees and places them at natural eye-gaze points. The result is that hybrid meetings feel more organic than in a traditionally designed room, like sitting around a half-digital, half-physical conversation circle.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable.”

Margie Strite, product marketing manager, Microsoft Teams

All Signature Teams Rooms have the following properties:

• In-person and remote attendees face each other
• Camera is at eye level
• Spatial audio can match a person’s voice to their location
• Remote participants have a clear view of everyone in the room

These seemingly small changes have a huge impact on how meetings are experienced.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable,” says Margie Strite, a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. “Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.”

“Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team

Other small shifts, such as including a content camera aimed at an analog whiteboard for meetings or including digital collaboration devices like the Surface Hub, offer ways to increase engagement between in-person and remote participants.

The exact methods used and specifications for each Signature Teams Room built can vary for each customer and are based on their unique scenarios.

“Our solutions are very individualized,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team at The Hive. “Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

The Hive also concentrates on resourcefulness, deploying meeting rooms that provide excellent hybrid meeting experiences while limiting costs.

Reducing costs while upgrading meeting rooms

The reduction of cost in this work is vital, particularly when building a new meeting room experience can cost as much as building a new house.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible.”

Sam Albert, principal product manager, The Hive

While some organizations might be comfortable spending large amounts of their budget to update and improve meeting rooms, many want to strike a balance between experience and cost-efficiency. This is largely why The Hive focuses on creating individualized solutions with its Signature Teams Rooms.

Most of the time, a lot of energy is put into making the most of what already exists within a room, rather than remodeling everything. There are also new, modular solutions being built within Microsoft.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive. “We’re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes—while driving down cost and complexity.”

A new low-cost, modular approach to deploying room solutions that our experts designed at The Hive bypasses the usual built-in technology and keeps costs down, even when the technology needs to be updated in the future.

“We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

Danielle Chelles-Blair, senior designer, Microsoft Digital

For example, in a large multi-purpose room, this solution features a mobile pod that works with Microsoft Teams Rooms and is equipped with audience-facing cameras, a presenter-tracking camera, and scalable audio. During a meeting room refresh at Microsoft, this modular solution helped cut our cost by 75 percent as compared to how we would traditionally upgrade the same meeting room.

Despite being more cost-effective and less intensive than traditional solutions, the modular solution is still designed to create inclusive hybrid meeting experiences.

“We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented,” says Danielle Chelles-Blair, a senior designer in Microsoft Digital. “We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

In addition to inclusivity and cost savings, for many organizations, the reduced trial-and-error to find effective meeting experience solutions is a marked benefit of turning to The Hive.

“Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs,” Strite says. “The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.”

Key takeaways

If you’re thinking about getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms, here are some tips to guide you:

• Plan your deployment. Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan. This includes identifying the rooms where you want to deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms, selecting the right hardware, and ensuring that your network infrastructure is ready for video conferencing.
• Get familiar with the features. Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. Some of these features include one-touch join, proximity detection, and content sharing. It’s important to get familiar with these features so that you can use them effectively during your meetings.
• Ensure that your devices are up-to-date. To ensure that you have the best possible experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to keep your devices up-to-date. This includes updating the firmware on your cameras, displays, and audio devices.
• Train your users. It’s important to train your users on how to use Microsoft Teams Rooms effectively. This includes teaching them how to join meetings, how to share content, and how to troubleshoot common issues.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Related links

• Go here to see and virtually experience a Signature Teams Room for yourself.
• Read more about signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms.
• Discover how we’re upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Learn how we’re transforming the experience of large hybrid meetings at Microsoft.
• Check out this video interview on deploying signature Microsoft Teams Rooms in our Canadian headquarters.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

It’s a new era, and even meeting rooms must reinvent themselves.

“In 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.

And just like any job candidate, a meeting room must now demonstrate its adaptability, technological proficiency, and ability to foster collaboration in the modern work environment, says Marzynski. He’s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.

Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor—it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.

As is the case with most large companies, our shift to remote work happened suddenly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic, of course, upended the way the work world operates, thinks, and interacts. Its impact on our company culture, infrastructure, and processes has been long-lasting.

Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we’re deep into the era of flexible work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform, we understand that remote participants are equally important and should be treated as such. When we work in a culture that emphasizes freedom of location, technology shouldn’t limit that choice.

Small shifts weren’t enough

At Microsoft, we’ve already made improvements to smaller rooms and executive boardrooms, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We’ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings and to promote collaboration. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.

Our biggest challenge yet has been creating a top-notch remote experience for our very large spaces. Picture the kind of venues that host all-staff meetings, events, and large-scale training sessions. Historically, such gatherings—those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online—haven’t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren’t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.

“If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,” says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.”

It’s difficult for presenters as well.

“Getting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn’t really happen well in these spaces,” Marzynski says.

Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren’t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.

Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That’s what The Hive is for—it’s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

Addressing the complexities of large gatherings

When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn’t do. A venue is not simply a scaled-up conference room because the dynamics of participation are different. Big, bold solutions were needed that required reexamining, reimagining, and redesigning both how Microsoft adapts existing tech and builds it fresh.

Unique challenges

Since 2020, Microsoft has been refreshing and retrofitting its 13,000-plus meeting rooms worldwide, equipping them with advanced new cameras, improved audio, and front-of-room screens. Of these, only around 400 are venues, or as we call them at Microsoft, multipurpose rooms.

But, as Marzynski puts it, “They’re an important 400 to get right, because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.”

As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.

Technological complexities

Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they’re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also ”re-interviewing” some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose.

This common opportunity led to one of our team’s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren’t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.

“Even before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience, because these big rooms are just very complicated,” Albert says. “They require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.”

Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.

“You might set it up differently depending on the event,” he says. “You might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.”

Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience’s relation to content, the remote and physical audience’s relationship with each other, and the presenter’s relationship with both groups.

“Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, ‘What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’” Marzynski says. “Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’”

Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, “out in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, ‘Can we build a room around this? And does it have to be a specific room, or can it be kind of a range of spaces? Can it be flexible? Can it adapt? And importantly, ‘How much will it cost?’”

Balancing cost and scale

Imagine a venue: a spacious training room, or a group of modular rooms that can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in size. Because they’re large and designed for a high degree of flexibility, equipping such enormous spaces properly is expensive, mostly because of the custom technology required. They’re among the most expensive square footage that an office building can have, they cost a lot to operate, and they generate the highest percentage of service tickets in our AV estate.

The Hive’s success with hybrid-enabling and value-engineering smaller meeting rooms, and the positive feedback they received, buoyed their enthusiasm for their attempt to solve large spaces.

The smaller conference rooms were one thing, but costs are higher for large venues with the extra technology needed to support them.

“Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy,” Albert says. “It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.”

Customer Zero: Iterating through feedback

To redesign venues, The Hive team used its lab to stress-test AI-driven presenter cameras, dedicated displays for remote attendees, a dedicated camera to capture the live audience, and enhanced Microsoft Teams features, among other tech.

After they had a working prototype, they were able to try it out internally with real events and get feedback via our Customer Zero program, in which we test and improve our own tech to help make our products better and more engaging. This allows us to offer our customers the best product we can.

“We brought our very rough early prototype into one of our all-hands meetings. It went reasonably well, Marzynski says. “It was a friendly audience, and we got some fantastic feedback.”

They put that feedback into action and prepared to show off new features at the following all-hands. It wasn’t quite smooth sailing.

“We did a dozen or so test events and many of them went well, but a couple were awful. We attempted to integrate some new technology into the older, existing AV and it just failed. Mic feedback, people couldn’t hear each other, that kind of stuff. Everyone was frustrated.”

But that’s all part of the innovation process.

“The feedback we received was blunt but actually encouraging. Our test users saw the potential and were cheering us on,” Marzynski says. “It was ‘Let’s keep making this better.’ So we kept testing it over and over again and it actually helped us make some important design choices.”

At every stage, the team sat down with their Microsoft Digital colleagues to refine their approach.

“We had workshops with our design teams,” Albert says. “We met with our research teams. We interviewed instructors and presenters who do Azure trainings every day. We talked to participants. That gave us a chance to really understand and dig deep into a lot of the challenges that are faced by people who are using these spaces.”

Designing for an equitable experience

The feedback from their Microsoft Digital colleagues underscored one unequivocal principle: Anything The Hive team developed had to be inclusive, equitable, and accessible to both in-person and remote employees.

Why?

Doing so creates an even playing field. It builds company culture. It’s empowering. It’s collaborative. It’s also good for business: When remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage to their in-person peers, everyone feels more invested in the discussion and outcomes.

Meetings that are natural and engaging help everyone feel like they’re in the same room.

“They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for hybrid meetings and workplace productivity at Microsoft Digital. “The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.”

It’s about making remote attendees feel fully included. “They can be avatars,” Sherry says. “They can be themselves. Whatever makes them comfortable.”

The important thing is that their cameras show them on the participant display.

“That reminds people in the room that many of the attendees are remote,” Sherry says. “It improves the experience for both, and remote employees are less likely to be forgotten.”

That said, there’s no doubt that the experiences will never be exactly the same for those in the room and those calling in remotely.

“There’s a certain energy that we’re not able to—or even trying to—replicate for remote participants,” Albert says. “We’re not trying to make it equal, really. We’re trying to make it the best it can be for each group.”

Taking advantage of internal and external insights

As Customer Zero, Microsoft provides The Hive with a fertile environment for a virtuous circle of improvements and feedback. The team has been working closely with different product groups to drive new features and priorities, which they pour back into subsequent improvements.

For example, The Hive team has partnered with our Continuous Learning team that, owing to its numerous trainings, are heavy users of larger venues.

And externally, they’ve involved a few trusted customers to help them get even more actionable feedback, adding to the iterative cycle.

“We have conversations with customers and event planners to try to make sure we’re not leaving any big holes in our experience and capabilities,” Albert says. “We’re now trying to cover all these different scenarios that we might not have been expecting when we were originally designing the space.”

The team anticipates getting a manufacturing partner involved and piloting a handful of solutions with different partners in the US, India, and Asia. The key going forward is making the tech for these large spaces modular by design, so they’re easier and quicker to install—and easier to support.

Lessening the complexity is a key concern. Initially, installing the large venue solution that they built took 30 days and a lot of technical work. But working closely with the installers to streamline the process has cut time that down considerably.  

“We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms,” Albert says. “We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.”

Our new large venue solution has had another major benefit—it has substantially reduced our operating costs. “In our pilot, we’re seeing our cost of deploying these large rooms go down by more than 50 percent,” Sherry says.

The reason is the new solution is so much simpler than the old one.

“We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced,” Sherry says. “A room that took 30 days to deploy can now be deployed in 2 days.” 

In addition, we anticipate that our total cost of ownership will go down over time because our room designs are easier to support and manage.

Building on success

As The Hive team continues to gather feedback and address the many complex aspects of creating hybrid capabilities in venues, they’re focused on solutions that please every participant, whether in person or remote, and keeping the barriers for entry, such as cost, as low as possible. 

Their work has netted what they call “drop-in” solutions, which are less complex technology lifts that can be quickly deployed in existing spaces without a lot of infrastructure investment. Such spaces receive an upgraded technology kit that includes projectors and audience-framing cameras, among other goodies.

Albert reports that customers who have visited the demo at The Hive have shown great interest in piloting venue solutions in their own spaces. Working with the tech that The Hive team has created lowers the barriers that customers face in testing and discovering new solutions on their own and burnishes Microsoft Digital’s reputation as an IT innovation center.

Our work to reinvent our large multipurpose venues has just begun and will continue. So far, these ultra-important rooms are absolutely acing reinterviewing for their jobs. 

Here are some tips on how you can improve your large meeting experience at your company:

• To meet your business needs in a flexible-work world, rethink your employee experience across all digital capabilities and physical spaces.
• Historically, venue spaces haven’t given remote attendees an equal experience compared to those in the room physically, but doing so benefits all parties and is good for business: Hybrid multipurpose venues boost inclusivity, productivity, and accessibility for both in-person and remote attendees.
• Venues aren’t just scaled-up meeting rooms. The dynamics of large, hybrid events demand a different AV engineering approach.
• You positively impact your company culture when remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage compared to their in-person peers because everyone feels more invested in the discussion and the meeting’s outcomes.
• Companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.

Try Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Learn how we’re designing a new hybrid meeting experience for everyone.
• Explore the development of Microsoft Teams Rooms technology.
• Explore how we collaborate at Microsoft today using Microsoft Teams and AI.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post How we’re transforming large meetings at Microsoft in the age of flexible work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When much of the world started working from home and many companies adopted a hybrid work model, we here at Microsoft began rethinking the way we meet and enable quality hybrid meeting experiences in all sizes and types of conference rooms.

When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, Microsoft Digital

One of the most important meeting room scenarios that we tackled and knew we had to get exactly right, was the executive boardroom.

“When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “It’s got to be thought through from every angle—acoustics, aesthetics, etc.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8LdrWaank.

Here at Microsoft, our team in Microsoft Digital worked with our partners in Global Workplace Services (GWS), our real estate organization, and the Microsoft Teams product group to build a new meeting room experience for executives that acknowledges the new post-pandemic world leaders are now working in.

“Every customer was being asked by their CEO, ‘What do we need to do to my boardroom so I can meet in it again,’” Hempey says. “They were telling their IT teams, ‘My old conference room is just not working for me now that I’m used to meeting on Teams. When I was working at home, we all worked on Teams and could see and hear each other. Now that I’ve gone back to the office, I can’t see or hear people who aren’t in the room, and they can’t see or hear people who are here in the room with me.’”

Signature Teams Rooms is our base high-value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting. The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

A fix was needed, and quickly.

We used our on-campus meeting room laboratory, The Hive, to develop a solution, the Signature boardroom experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms, our Microsoft Teams meeting room product. The Signature boardroom experience is a combination of thoughtful physical design and ground-breaking use of technology. It helps meeting attendees feel connected to the meeting no matter where they join from.

The Signature boardroom experience is unique because of its high profile and its size.

“Signature Teams Rooms is our base high-value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The boardroom takes that one step further, because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.”

We spent eight months getting the Signature boardroom experience “just right,” and first deployed it in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s conference room at the start of this calendar year. Now we’re gradually rolling it out to other executive meeting rooms as we’re able.

Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture. That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

The need for a Signature boardroom experience came from the way work changed after the pandemic.

“Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture,” says Greg Baribault, group product manager for Microsoft Teams and head of product for the team that builds Microsoft Teams meeting room systems. “That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.”

Getting technical

Bigger than our typical Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, the Signature boardroom experience is designed for 16 to 30 people. Its size and complexity required that we make a lot of decisions about what technology to put in the room and how it would work. Specifically, the team at the Hive worked closely with top audiovisual partners to evaluate, deploy and program the Microsoft Teams certified cameras, microphones, speakers and display technologies.

For example, bigger rooms also made it more important to make sure everyone can see the Teams meeting on the display—including shared content and the hand raise and chat panels—from anywhere.

In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself. We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

And just like in many executive boardrooms, there’s a wall of glass that brings in a lot of natural light, so another important design consideration in choosing a display technology that people can see even when it’s full daylight. “That’s how we landed on a large, direct-view LED video wall, and it’s only at 30 percent of its potential brightness,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive.

The video wall is an ultra-wide display, measuring nearly 12 feet by 5.5 feet. Remote participants appear life-size, as if they’re sitting opposite the in-person participants. This is important to make the boardroom experience equitable and inclusive for all participants, whether remote or in-person.

“In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself,” Marzynski says. “We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.”

That also leads to the unique table shape of our executive boardroom. The Boardroom archetype is ideally designed with a U-shaped table, open on one end to the front-of-room displays, so the remote participants appear there. That said, the Signature boardroom experience is flexible and can support oval and rectangle tables as well, because you can’t aways change out your tables, even for executive boardrooms.

“The circle of inclusion now includes the screen with remote participants at the same height as everybody sitting at the table,” Marzynski says. “It’s almost like they’re virtually in the room with you. Everybody is seated in a way that welcomes in these participants.”

All of the cameras in the room can pan, tilt, and zoom for a cinematic experience, similar to a multi-camera television show.

“The biggest piece of feedback we got from the old version of the room was that we could see everyone—except if they were standing in the front of the room presenting,” Hempey says. “Some in our senior leadership team are mostly remote, and seeing the face of the person standing at the front of the room is really important to their experience.”

The solution was several cameras, which work together with microphones in the ceiling to figure out who’s speaking, and then the appropriate camera can focus on that person.

“You can’t deploy just a single camera in a space of that size,” Albert says. “You need multiple cameras placed strategically around the room to get the best view of every seat at the table and presentation spaces.”

Reading the room

Reading the room is another challenge in a hybrid meeting, as you can’t always tell what body language people are displaying. If there was just one camera view, then you would only see the person who’s currently speaking. But with multiple cameras, one is assigned to provide a view of the room as a whole.

“There’s one camera dedicated to providing the context view, like picture-in-picture, overlaying a picture of the entire room over the people who are talking,” Marzynski says. “That way even if one or two people are talking, you have a chance of seeing how the rest of the room is reacting. And that is really, really powerful.”

You might think all these cameras would be an intrusive presence. And you’d have been right for an earlier iteration of the room, in which the cameras all “woke up” at the same time and created an unnerving feeling of being surveilled for in-person participants. However, the cameras are now much more unobtrusive, thanks to a lot of collaboration with GWS on finishes. The cameras are now in colors that match the ceiling and walls where they’re located, so they provide a great user experience without calling attention to themselves.

Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft. It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting room—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities; yes, it has a much bigger screen; yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, Microsoft Digital

The speakers are also top-of-the-line and were designed to support the new Teams Rooms spatial audio experience. The Microsoft Digital team installed speakers in the front of the room and just below the video wall, additions complemented by existing overhead speakers. This array of speakers makes it so remote participants are heard as if their voice is coming from where they appear on the screen.

Despite the technological complexity of the boardroom, our team made sure its user experience is comparable with other Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft,” Hempey says. “It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities; yes, it has a much bigger screen; yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super-simple user experience.”

All that technology required a lot of collaboration with GWS. Their team helped with making sure the electrical outlets were powerful enough to support all the new components, including the cameras, microphones, and display. They also needed to make sure the HVAC system was strong enough to keep the room comfortable with the huge video wall emanating heat. In addition to that, they handled architecture, permitting, and defining standards for acoustics, lighting, table shapes, and furniture layouts.

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

“We didn’t start with the Microsoft boardroom,” Albert says. “We started with some functional mockups in found spaces. It was before the campus was fully opened, and we borrowed some spaces that were about the same size.”

After experimenting with those spaces, the Microsoft Digital team found executives to “dogfood” the experimental room setup.

The work started at The Hive, our incubation space on Microsoft campus where life-size prototypes can be built and tested.

“One of the best things about The Hive is the ability to very rapidly prototype and fail fast on space design, the overall design of the experience,” Baribault says. “They [the Microsoft Digital team] like to try a lot of different things, and there’s an experimentation process they go through. That’s a process you can go through in a space purpose-built for that. You can’t really do that in a high-end executive boardroom. The Hive’s been a tremendous asset for us the last few years as we’ve learned about hybrid work.”

It’s a place where we blend software with the physical world.

“We have this unique working area in The Hive that I like to call ‘phygital,’” Marzynski says. “Phygital is about delivering a digitally enhanced experience in a physical location—it’s where we combine meeting furniture, ambiance, and everything you feel in a meeting room with technology.”

The “phygital” concept is about using the power of software to avoid spending lots of money on physically rebuilding your meeting rooms.

“The technology adapts to the physical environment, not the other way around,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for Microsoft Digital. “The technology is flexible enough to work within the constraints of the room to save time and cost, as the cameras can be configured to work with any existing furniture and fixtures.”

Getting to success

The hard, and sometimes nail-biting work of getting the Signature boardroom experience ready has been well worth the effort.

“It took our teams around 10 months to build, test, and iterate to create our Signature boardroom experience,” Sherry says. “We were able to take all our learnings from multiple buildouts and technology solutions and consolidate them in to one archetype that provides a roadmap for creating new hybrid boardrooms that work right out of the box.”

And it’s paying off—it now takes only six weeks to upgrade an executive meeting space. “It went live in February and now it’s been over half a year, and by all accounts it’s been really successful,” Marzynski says. “We got nice kudos from one of our leaders—he was bowled over by it and said, ‘This is awesome!’ It was a really nice feeling.”

We plan to make the specs for building the experience available to customers soon.

We have a replica of the boardroom in our Executive Briefing Center, and it’s very popular with customers who visit us there. Some have even asked for the parts list so they can recreate exactly what Microsoft has done with the boardroom.

“In this case, we shipped software, but we also shipped guidance on how to get started,” Baribault says. “It became a collaboration in not just solving our own problem but creating a solution to help our customers as well. That was a new thing for all of us and I hope it sets a new model for the company.”

In addition to being critical for high-level meetings, an important aspect of boardrooms in general is that they are very expensive, not just to build, but to operate.

“The cost of operating a boardroom is really significant to our customers, because these types of rooms often come with specialized support because of their complexity,” Sherry says. “You’re often not relying on the company’s AV and IT support—you have a white-glove service, and if something goes wrong you pick up the hotline, and they’re there.”

Still, AI reduces the operating costs, because a person isn’t needed to switch cameras manually and check sound levels. That can be done in software.

“We always think of the cost of building a room, but you end up paying a lot more to operate the room than you did to install it,” Sherry says. “And that’s important to our customers.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience:

• Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan your deployment. You need to consider your room size, layout, equipment, network, security, and licensing requirements. You can use our Meeting room guidance for Teams to help you design and optimize your meeting spaces with Microsoft Teams Rooms solutions and devices.
• Get familiar with the features: Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. You can use the touchscreen console to join and manage meetings, share content, adjust audio and video settings, and more. You can also use voice commands to control the room with Cortana. You can learn more about the features and how to use them from the Microsoft Teams Rooms help & learning page.
• Configure and manage your devices: After you’ve deployed your Microsoft Teams Rooms devices, you need to configure and manage them to ensure they work properly and securely. You can use the Microsoft Teams admin center, PowerShell, or third-party tools to configure settings, update firmware, monitor device health, troubleshoot issues, and more. You can find detailed instructions on how to configure and manage your devices from the Microsoft Teams Rooms page.

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience.

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Read about how we’re deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms and generative AI at the new Microsoft Canada headquarters.
• Explore why we’re buzzing about Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at Microsoft.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

We periodically update our stories, but we can’t verify that they represent the full picture of our current situation at Microsoft. We leave them on the site so you can see what our thinking and experience was at the time.

New Microsoft Teams-powered hybrid meeting room technology is helping us design new experiences for our employees and vendors here at Microsoft and helping customers understand how to achieve these experiences for themselves.

“We want to create an environment that is halfway between the physical and virtual,” says Matt Hempey, a principal program manager with Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. “These rooms represent the kind of hybrid experiences that we can deploy at scale around the world.”

We’ve had to look at what technologies we can use to make our remote employees feel more included in a meeting, and vice versa. We had to help the people who are physically present feel more connected to people who are remote.

—Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation, Global Workplace Services

By adjusting the AV and swapping out furniture, we have created a more inclusive and collaborative Microsoft Teams meeting experience that is optimized to interact with remote attendees and that is better for both our in-person and remote attendees. We’ve begun selectively deploying this experience in our medium-sized conference rooms.

“We’ve had to look at what technologies we can use to make our remote employees feel more included in a meeting, and vice versa,” says Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation for Global Workplace Services. “We had to help the people who are physically present feel more connected to people who are remote.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQwFvg-kRv4.

Looking at meeting rooms from a new angle

In the past, those calling into a meeting room may have felt ignored or less engaged with the conversation. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—where everyone needed to join remotely—leveled the field a bit, creating new expectations for what meetings should be like for virtual attendees. Now that many of our employees are back at the office for part of the time, there’s a need to reimagine the workplace.

We dedicated this space to really rethink how the meeting room should be redesigned to optimize for hybrid. We cleared out all the tables and all the tech and just started with a blank slate.

—Matt Hempey, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Hempey, Weiskopf, and team have been transforming the company’s meeting room experience at The Hive, our experimental workshop where teams from across the company build and validate new physical and virtual experiences and technology.

“We dedicated this space to really rethink how the meeting room should be redesigned to optimize for hybrid,” Hempey says. “We cleared out all the tables and all the tech and just started with a blank slate.”

It was all about being creative within the meeting room space.

“We had to rethink things from the ground up,” says Sam Albert, a principal program manager on Hempey’s team. His specialty is reimagining how meeting rooms can be built, often with a circular cutting saw in hand.

“The first thing we did was to rotate the room,” Albert says, explaining how seating configurations work to optimize the new front-row layout in Microsoft Teams Rooms. “That allowed us to have the people in the room look at each other, but importantly, also look at the people who were calling in.”

This is done by re-orienting attention from the center of the room towards the display and camera. “This allows us to approximate face-to-face interaction,” Albert says. “Our front row alignment is a core part of our hybrid meeting room experience.”

But in order to implement this vision—whether it be to deploy a new meeting room optimized for a hybrid experience or to work with a traditional meeting room with a table at its center—new equipment and standards had to be developed.

We started off with a very large and complex assembly. What we did is to take the projectors off the ceiling, the speakers off the walls, and we eliminated all those wiring runs. Then we invented a stand to hold everything together at the front of the room.

—Sam Albert, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Gearing up for a new meeting room experience

Changing the guts of a meeting room—all the AV equipment and wiring—has always been challenging.

“We started off with a very large and complex assembly,” Albert says. “What we did is to take the projectors off the ceiling, the speakers off the walls, and we eliminated all those wiring runs. Then we invented a stand to hold everything together at the front of the room.”

After a few iterations, the result was a single enclosure that contains all the audio, video, projection, compute, and networking needs. This one piece of equipment, with its simplified design, can be brought into a room and plugged in.

Other technology added to the AV standard includes a wide-angle camera, which captures everything in the room. This same camera can use artificial intelligence to provide in-video close-up views of participants in the room, making it a better experience for remote attendees. Simultaneously, AI-powered audio devices reduce echo and howling, the kind of nuisances that used to haunt virtual attendees in the past.

Some assembly required

Rooms designed for hybrid experiences are also being equipped with optimized furniture as part of the new AV standard.

For medium-sized spaces, a curved table encircles the AV equipment stack and faces a large 21:9 aspect ratio projector screen directly.

“That gives us a nice wide surface area to show all the remote attendees in the room,” Hempey says. “You’re seeing them at eye level and about human size, so they’re true life-sized folks. The camera can see everyone sitting around the table, so you’ve got that same great hybrid experience.”

These large screens also have space for content, including chat activity, raised hands, and other critical meeting items that might go unnoticed in traditional layouts.

For smaller rooms, a gumdrop or guitar pick-shaped table is installed to maintain that same degree of face-to-face engagement, while an equally camera-visible and taller table located at the back of the room maximizes the usability of the space. The addition of this second table increases occupancy to 10 seats and creates another working area, giving smaller rooms extra versatility. This back area can include a Microsoft Surface Hub to further support and promote collaboration. Smaller groups can utilize this space for digital whiteboarding, either in-person or as part of the hybrid experience.

The new AV standard for hybrid optimized meeting rooms can be adjusted to account for rooms that break the mold. Ultra-wide LED screens, for example, replace projectors in executive suites with large windows. These screens can handle the bright conditions without compromising the experience for in-person attendees.

A platform to bring the team together

While equipment, furniture, and arrangement of space drive a big part of the global AV standard that we’re developing, it’s Microsoft Teams that we use to bridge the physical and virtual divide.

“As we work across our rooms to make them optimized for hybrid, Microsoft Teams gives us the platform that allows us to be flexible, to deploy the right experience, with the right equipment, for each audience in each space,” Hempey says.

We’re literally real-time developing standards, for things that we would like to roll out quicker than our normal life cycle or refresh cycle, so that we can get those kind of enhanced hybrid and meeting experiences in the hands of our employees and guests, and customers much faster.

—Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation, Global Workplace Services

From an operations and engineering standpoint, Microsoft Teams enables Microsoft to plug components into the meeting rooms. Various technologies can be selected during setup, integrating seamlessly into the collaboration platform.

Microsoft Teams also gives users a familiar meeting experience, whether they’re remote or in-person. It’s also a flexible platform, one that has been easy to experiment with, Weiskopf says.

“We’re literally real-time developing standards, for things that we would like to roll out quicker than our normal life cycle or refresh cycle, so that we can get those kind of enhanced hybrid and meeting experiences in the hands of our employees and guests, and customers much faster,” he says.

Empowering simple, consistent, and reliable hybrid experiences at scale

As Microsoft brings this new global AV standard to our meeting rooms, attendees—both remote and in-person—will benefit from a more inclusive engagement. The standards introduce simplicity and a unified design, creating an easy-to-utilize and consistent workspace for users. And for those who manage and operate meeting rooms, the new global standards make it straightforward to deploy and maintain.

Our goal is to design fantastic meeting space experiences that deliver value across a variety of scenarios and price points. And we want to show customers how we do it so they can do the same things at their companies.

—Matt Hempey, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Teams gives attendees and operators a friendly and familiar platform to engage with. A variety of AV devices at a range of prices can be quickly added and onboarded into a Microsoft Teams Rooms-powered conference room.

“Our goal is to design fantastic meeting space experiences that deliver value across a variety of scenarios and price points,” Hempey says. “And we want to show customers how we do it so they can do the same things at their companies.”

• Hybrid meetings start with inclusivity and accessibility. Designs should be user-centric and account for everyone, in-person or virtual.
• Microsoft’s new global AV standards address the intersection of furniture, AV equipment, physical arrangement, and software to support the hybrid meeting room experience.
• Meeting rooms optimized for hybrid aren’t just for remote attendees, they create the experiences that make it worth the trip to the office.
• Microsoft Teams serves as the backbone for hybrid meetings. It offers attendees a consistent interface and experience while also serving as an easy-to-use platform for those responsible for creating and maintaining meeting spaces.

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Learn more about the buzz around Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at Microsoft.
• Check out this article and video about The Hive—the place where we’re developing and testing the meeting rooms of the future.
• Read about five ways we’re getting more out Microsoft Teams in the era of AI.
• Explore how we’re upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post How Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience with Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

New hybrid meeting experiences are coming to Microsoft’s employees and guests, a Microsoft Teams Rooms-powered transformation that will save space at the table for everyone, no matter where they join from.

Thanks to new meeting room layouts, improved technology, and better integration with Microsoft Teams, remote participants will feel more included in meetings that will also be better for people in the room.

When they decide to go into the office, employees want experiences that are worth the commute. That means making sure that when they choose to go in, they do so for an experience that they can’t get from home.

—Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

Getting these experiences right will play a big part in helping everyone feel comfortable and included in this new hybrid work environment. It’s not about making sure both remote and in-the-room experiences are perfectly equal—that’s not possible. Rather, the goal is to enhance and optimize each experience so each is the best it can be.

“When they decide to go into the office, employees want experiences that are worth the commute,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “That means making sure that when they choose to go in, they do so for an experience that they can’t get from home.”

Vice versa, it’s important to make sure that those who work from home, at a coffee shop, or from a hotel on the road feel like that experience has been optimized for them.

“We’re building solutions that solve for both sets of needs,” D’Hers says. “Most of us are working in both worlds anyway—it benefits us all to get both experiences right.”

Several organizations across Microsoft—including Microsoft Digital, Global Workplace Services, and Microsoft’s product groups—are working together to make sure we get these hybrid experiences right. We want to properly greet employees and guests when they go to a Microsoft campus and that we make them feel equally welcome when they virtually join a meeting.

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3efXIKjpA.

Along with other new transformations—including improved transportation, dining, and workspace reservation experiences—creating new hybrid meeting room experiences represents a major step forward in the future of work at Microsoft.

Meet The Hive

There’s a place on Microsoft’s Puget Sound campus where our software engineers, audio-video engineers, architects, and interior designers are coming together to weave new devices, technology, and concepts into transformed meeting room experiences.

It’s called The Hive.

“It’s the facility where we bring in all the new devices that are coming to us from our OEM partners and test them out and see how they work,” says Matt Hempey, a principal program manager who focuses on engagement and collaboration at Microsoft Digital. “We think about all of the subtleties of how a physical space and hardware can interact—that’s the challenge we’re trying to solve here at The Hive. This is how we can get things just right for everyone.”

In The Hive, teams across Microsoft can gather to brainstorm, test, and validate all meeting room scenarios that they can think up. It’s all about coming up with new ideas, like being inspired to try a new room layout when a set of new components comes in. This can include moving walls, bringing in new furniture, and cutting a table in half—all of this can be done quickly without having to do the expensive work of structural redesign.

It used to be that people dialing into a meeting felt like they weren’t going to be as important as people who were physically there. Suddenly we were in a world where no one was physically in the room, so everyone was having the same meeting experience. Everyone was equally important; meetings became more inclusive—everyone felt heard and seen.

—Matt Hempey, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

“We think of it as our living laboratory,” says Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation for Global Workplace Services. “You’ve got cardboard tables and Styrofoam things that we can move around and do rapid prototyping and testing with. It’s our little garage that we can tool around with stuff.”

A new work experience

When thousands of Microsoft conference rooms around the globe suddenly sat empty, it was clear that the work experience was changing. The shift to fully remote demonstrated that people liked flexibility and that meetings could happen from anywhere.

In some ways, it leveled the playing field.

“It used to be that people dialing into a meeting felt like they weren’t going to be as important as people who were physically there,” Hempey says. “Suddenly we were in a world where no one was physically in the room, so everyone was having the same meeting experience. Everyone was equally important; meetings became more inclusive—everyone felt heard and seen.”

At the same time, a lot of human connection was lost.

Social bonds, the richness of discussions, the little chats that occur at the start of the meeting, and the fidelity of in-person brainstorming on a whiteboard were missed. As good as the remote technology was, some individuals still had a strong desire to get back together in meeting rooms.

We’ve had to look at what technologies can be used to make remote employees feel more included in a meeting and vice versa. It involves physical changes to the room and furniture, technical changes to the audio-visual equipment and software. And then, of course, trying to optimize this idea of including everyone.

—Scott Weiskopf, director of the Center of Innovation, Global Workplace Services

The shift brought on by the pandemic gave employees the opportunity to choose the kind of workstyle that worked best for them. Some would remain working from home while others would come back to the office. And some would manage a mix of both.

It was clear this dueling dynamic between remote and in-person would require new accommodations from Microsoft.

Having a modular environment to come up with new ideas—The Hive—has empowered Microsoft to pivot to these new circumstances, including upgrading to a new Microsoft Teams Rooms experience powered by hybrid meeting rooms.

Doing hybrid right

The pause in meeting room usage meant The Hive team could step away from normal escalations and concerns and get creative in designing the new workplace experience. This break from the norm would ultimately prove to be key in deciphering the balance between employee needs.

“We’ve had to look at what technologies can be used to make remote employees feel more included in a meeting and vice versa,” Weiskopf says of the effort to help connect in-person and remote attendees in a meeting room. “It involves physical changes to the room and furniture, technical changes to the audio-visual equipment and software. And then, of course, trying to optimize this idea of including everyone.”

Collaborators throughout The Hive designed Microsoft’s new hybrid meeting rooms as immersive and inclusive spaces. Everything was reimagined: fabric, light, different pieces of furniture, and how the space itself is arranged.

“What creates a great hybrid experience is not necessarily the technology as much as just the way everyone is facing,” Hempey says. “If people are facing each other in the room, they’re not focused on the people that are there remotely.”

By default, all of Microsoft’s new hybrid meeting rooms face a large screen where remote attendees are displayed. Rooms that used to sit 10 in a center-facing direction will now be refitted with a guitar pick-shaped table that focuses attention on the screen and cameras at the front of the room.

To offset any loss of capacity due to the new table shape, a second elevated table sits at the back of the room. Cameras in the room easily capture both levels of seating, so remote attendees can clearly see everyone in the room.

Other design decisions, like enabling presentations and content to appear on screen without bumping remote attendees out of line of sight, further enhance the experience. A Microsoft Surface Hub at the back of the hybrid meeting room generates additional functionality, allowing the device to be utilized for groups of two or three people without starting a formal meeting.

Working as a team

You can’t create a hybrid space without thinking about the technology that’s going to bring in virtual attendees.

Transitioning to Microsoft Teams prior to the pandemic was a huge benefit for when it was time to go virtual. Now that same technology is central to Microsoft’s hybrid meeting room experience.

“People already associate Microsoft with software, they expect to see lot of computer screens and code,” Hempey says. “For software to shine, you need the room itself to be that end-to-end experience. Our basic fundamental premise is that every room you walk into is just a Teams room, just like the software that’s on your device.”

We’re trying to get experiences right at Microsoft and hopefully others can benefit from that as well. We can be very transparent about the challenges that we face. Our software is constantly evolving; our products are constantly getting better.

—Matt Hempey, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

To further improve the attendee experience, hybrid meeting rooms do away with some of the traditional headaches of finding the right cable hookups and inviting everyone into the call. Instead, the same process for joining a call in Microsoft Teams initiates the room.

This empowers attendees to use their own devices to interact with and take advantage of the room’s features.

A new standard for work

With around 13,000 meeting rooms around the globe, Microsoft is developing a way to quickly deploy these new features to employees and guests. It’s a challenge everyone is facing as the new hybrid model of work is embraced.

“We’re developing standards for things that we would like to roll out quicker than our normal refresh cycle so that we can get a better hybrid experience in the hands of our employees, guests, and customers much faster,” Weiskopf says.

In rapidly testing and prototyping scenarios and use cases inside The Hive, Microsoft has created global AV design standards that enable hybrid meeting room experiences to exist at scale.

“We’re trying to get experiences right at Microsoft and hopefully others can benefit from that as well,” Hempey says of the new hybrid meeting rooms. “We can be very transparent about the challenges that we face. Our software is constantly evolving; our products are constantly getting better.”

As new lessons are learned, Microsoft can quickly update, incorporate, and deploy changes. This iterative process will allow employees and guests to have experiences that make the trip to a Microsoft campus worthwhile.

“It’s the combination of software, hardware, and the placement of people and cameras that enable the experience,” D’Hers says. “And that’s what creates the kind of experiences that we want, that are personal and accessible.”

• The conference rooms of the past won’t necessarily be the conference rooms people want for the future; the space itself must be part of the hybrid solution.
• Space is expensive, companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.
• Microsoft’s hybrid experience is built on Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams.
• The global AV design standards are available to other companies who are looking to build new hybrid meeting rooms. This reduces the uplift of testing and discovering new solutions.

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms

• Learn more about the buzz around Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at Microsoft.
• Discover how Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience.
• Read about five ways we’re getting more out Microsoft Teams in the era of AI.
• Explore how we’re upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Crafting a new hybrid meeting room experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Hybrid (or flexible) work requires a change in mindset, culture, and technology, creating challenges and opportunities as Microsoft empowers employee productivity from anywhere.

When it comes to embracing flexible work at Microsoft, employees want options. In this video, Microsoft Chief Digital Officer Andrew Wilson and Microsoft CVP of Employee Experience Nathalie D’Hers share how Microsoft is giving its 180,000-plus employees the flexibility and connection they want.

“We were able to keep people productive from day one because we had moved most of our key workload to the cloud in a Zero Trust security model,” D’Hers says. “Our cloud-first approach is going to continue to be critical in hybrid work because we want to make sure that people are productive and secure from wherever they’re working.”

Note: You may need to be logged in to LinkedIn to view the video below.

You’ll also hear them share tips on how you can get the most out of working in a flexible-work environment at your company, which requires alignment across the physical space, digital capabilities, and cultural norms.

One of D’Hers’ big pieces of advice to leaders for powering employee productivity?

“Accelerate your move to the cloud,” D’Hers says. “While it initially might seem like a daunting task, the long-term impact from an employee experience standpoint and cost-savings perspective are well worth it.”

Wilson also advocates for a learn-it-all mindset, something that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also discussed. Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva are great tools to do that.

“One size doesn’t fit all, and we don’t have all the answers,” Wilson says. “We’re going to evolve together.”

• Make investments to transform your digital capabilities, cultural norms, and physical spaces and facilities.
• Enable everyone to be seen, heard, and fully participate from anywhere with Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Use Azure Digital Twins and Internet of Things connected devices to power smart buildings at Microsoft and connect data from motion and occupancy sensors.
• Leverage a Zero Trust security model to ensure you have a healthy and protected environment that reinforces strong identity, device health, and least privilege access.

• Check out D’Hers’ post about how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.
• Read about how Microsoft is accelerating its global real estate transformation using Microsoft Azure Digital Twins.
• Discover the buzz around new meeting-room technology and experiences at Microsoft.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Powering hybrid work at Microsoft: A conversation with Andrew Wilson and Nathalie D’Hers appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

One of the most challenging aspects of leading the Employee Experience team at Microsoft is the deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe. Since employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As a result, employees have consistently identified that experience as an area for improvement.

By investing in the meeting experience with Microsoft Teams and by reimagining the physical and virtual spaces where meetings take place, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help Microsoft employees and our customers thrive in a hybrid world of work.

—Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

Thanks to Microsoft Teams and the innovation being driven by the product team, we’ve seen a real opportunity to transform Microsoft employee and customer meetings from a weakness to a strength. By investing in the meeting experience with Microsoft Teams and by reimagining the physical and virtual spaces where meetings take place, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help Microsoft employees and our customers thrive in a hybrid world of work.

We’ve already seen satisfaction with meetings increase, while also making sure hybrid work remains seamless for Microsoft and our customers. How are we doing it? I’m glad you asked!

Simple questions, complex answers

The Microsoft’s WorkLab blog describes hybrid work as …”a blended model where some employees return to the workplace and others continue to work from home.” The Microsoft 2022 Work Trend Index identified five key trends driving hybrid work. While all are relevant, two stood out to us:

1. Employees have a new “worth it” equation
2. Leaders need to make the office worth the commute

It was clear we had some work to do as a team to ensure a successful hybrid future. My team asked two simple questions:

• What is the value of our physical work environment in a hybrid work world?
• What kind of meeting experiences satisfy the modern world of hybrid work?

Our answer to the first question was simple—to socialize and to collaborate. The pandemic tested all of us in innumerable ways, but a common response from employees, even those who have enjoyed the flexibility to work from home, is how hard it can be to collaborate remotely. The ability to socialize and connect is closely related, as both of those activities build trust, an essential ingredient of successful teams. We determined that the meeting experience of the future needed to honor the value of physical space while making it possible for everyone to fully participate, regardless of where they were.

The second question was more complicated. We recognized the need for simple, powerful meeting experiences in our facilities and had been working on just that in the years leading up to the pandemic. But how could we reimagine the meeting experience to enable our employees to collaborate without friction and feel connected even if physically apart? Microsoft Teams has already implemented an innovative feature in Together Mode to help make hybrid teams more connected. But how could we take that vision to the next level?

The way things were—hybrid meetings in an in-person world

To answer that question, contributors across Microsoft have built prototypes in a space we call “the Hive,” a design environment optimized for reimagining physical and virtual spaces. In the Hive, PMs, designers, and software engineers are empowered to question everything, so no idea goes unexplored, and no constraints go unchallenged. This approach led to breakthroughs across both physical and virtual space.

In the physical world, a typical Microsoft conference room consists of a rectangular table, with space for six to 18 people, dependent on room size. It’s a pretty traditional layout you’ve likely seen before. A large monitor or projector screen is mounted on a wall. In person attendees are oriented toward each other on either side of the table, not facing the screen unless they tilt their chairs. Online participants are out of sight during discussion, only visible when in-person participants are focused on the screen. Physical white boards are situated on either side of the table, out of view for online participants. These traditional conference rooms were designed and optimized for in-person collaboration, inadvertently putting remote participants at a disadvantage.

In the virtual space, Teams focuses on a shared presentation or a “spotlighted” presenter. Whomever shares their screen needs to choose what additional details to display whether it be the list of attendees, the chat window, or neither, in order to maximize presentation space. While Teams is highly optimized for the online meeting experience, the hybrid meeting experience was uneven. We realized quickly we had some work to do if hybrid meetings were going to continue to be the future of work at Microsoft and for many of our customers.

Building the perfect meeting

To address these shortcomings, we spun up a virtual team comprised of product engineers, representatives from our facilities team, and the Microsoft Digital team. Together, we imagined a new meeting room experience that would offer a corporate boardroom-like experience for all employees.

The team began by shifting the center of the room from the middle of a table to the halfway point between in-person and remote attendees. They imagined a “single pane” of content instead of multiple screens, where remote attendees could appear at eye level and approximately life size. With the seating arrangement allowing more viewable space, content takes center stage, with still more room for chat and other meeting content at the sides.

As the team iterated, they began to see an exciting new experience taking shape: one that brought people together across physical and virtual spaces. Remote attendees might join from their phone, their home, or a focus room somewhere else on campus, but each participant was on equal footing and on the same page.

As the heartbeat of the employee experience across the company, and as part of the team that propels the company forward in terms of modern workplace patterns and practices, it’s important that we provide an inspirational enterprise blueprint for customers and partners.

—Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Employee Experience

Since sharing these prototype designs, the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Unlike bespoke systems from some of our competitors, the new meeting room experience we’ve envisioned can be created and supported with commodity hardware at modest cost and powered via enhancements to our already ubiquitous Microsoft Teams product. We were thrilled when Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted this prototype environment in their talks at Microsoft Ignite, and since then there has been an outpouring of interest from customers and hundreds of engagements at The Hive.

From “traditional IT” to “stewards of the Employee Experience”

This new meeting experience is a great example of how my team inspires our Microsoft product teams by thinking holistically about the employee experience and driving innovation that helps our customers. As the heartbeat of the employee experience across the company, and part of the team that propels the company forward in terms of modern workplace patterns and practices, it’s important that we provide an inspirational enterprise blueprint for customers and partners.

With this new meeting room experience, we’re leading the way and preparing for a future of hybrid work that is here to stay, and where everyone regardless of their physical location can collaborate, socialize, and feel like a trusted and important member of the team. Coupled with inclusive meeting behaviors, we believe that hybrid meetings can be just as productive as in-person meetings if done right.

It’s been exciting working with our counterparts in product development and facilities to turn this prototype into a real experience that will help everyone to be more productive. It’s a great demonstration towards our commitment to Microsoft’s mission to Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

• Familiarize yourself with Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide to enhance video conferencing, chat, document collaboration, and integration functionalities.
• Evaluate your current meeting spaces, whether physical or virtual, and identify areas where improvements can be made. Consider how you can create a more inclusive and engaging meeting environment that promotes collaboration and participation for both remote and in-person attendees.
• Embrace the concept of hybrid work within your organization. Encourage employees to adapt to the hybrid work model and establish inclusive meeting practices that ensure everyone, regardless of their physical location, feels connected and valued during meetings.

• Discover the buzz around new meeting-room technology and experiences at Microsoft.
• Unpack driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post How Microsoft is reimagining meetings for hybrid work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.